Polly Read online

  He was so amazed at the insanity of the idea that it took him a few minutes to realize that Polly was trying to say good-bye.

  “Polly,” he said gently, unaware that he was using her first name. “Wouldn’t it be better to go home?”

  “Home? I am home,” said Polly, waving her fan toward the hostel.

  “I mean Stone Lane. If you would like to collect your belongings, I can take you there.”

  Polly wanted to escape from his company. But she also longed for home. “All right,” she said hurriedly. “I’ll be very quick.”

  She sprang lightly from the carriage and ran into the hostel.

  In a surprisingly short time she reappeared carrying a small trunk and a shopping bag full of Christmas parcels that she shyly handed to the footman.

  The carriage jerked forward and the two occupants sat in silence again.

  At last the marquis said quietly, “Talk about it, Polly. Talk about Peter. Don’t keep it all inside.”

  She shook her head dumbly and he could see the glint of tears in the corner of her eyes.

  “You are not the only one who has these humiliating experiences. Shall I tell you about mine?” He went on without waiting for her reply.

  “I was just seventeen and had finished my studies at Eton. One of my best friends was a youth called Gerald Parkenshaw. He had a twin sister called Penelope and all us boys adored her. She was tiny, elfin, with masses of glossy black curls. We teased her and called her Madcap Penny but we were all secretly in love with her.

  “Well, the twins’ parents were giving an end-of-term party and all Gerald’s Etonian friends were invited, including me. I knew the other boys had all planned to bring Penny silly, funny gifts, like stuffed animals or love poems, but I decided to steal a march on them and be grown-up and different. My parents were ridiculously generous about my allowance and I had saved up enough to buy a small diamond ring. I was going to lure Penny into the conservatory at the party, present the ring, and declare my love on bended knee. All this I told to brother Gerald.

  “The big night arrived. Penny was all in white and had never looked more lovely. When it came my turn to dance with her, I was trembling with nerves but, plucking up my courage, I suggested that the ballroom was too stuffy and that it would be a jolly idea to stroll in the conservatory. She said, ‘What fun!’ and led the way with singularly unmaidenly enthusiasm. Undeterred however, I sank to one knee and seized her hand. I told her all sorts of rot. I said she was a goddess and that I was only fit to kiss the hem of her gown—which I did. I then begged her to be my wife. I rose to my feet and presented her with the tiny diamond ring. And what did my love say? She said, ‘Oh, you silly chump, Eddie!’ and burst into peals of laughter. And out from behind the palms came all my old school chums, laughing fit to burst.

  “I felt I would die with shame and humiliation. I felt the whole world was staring at me and jeering. But next day everyone had forgotten about it—except of course Gerald, because I took him aside and punched his head for telling his sister about my plans.

  “I saw Penny only last week. She has turned into a fat, bullying woman with a strident voice and her husband—she married a merchant banker—spends as much time abroad as he possibly can.

  “To end this long story—I think Peter will grow into a very pompous businessman.”

  “But you did not cause the humiliation by pretending to be someone other than yourself,” said Polly slowly. “You were not social climbing.”

  “No,” he replied equally gently. “But I did rather fancy myself as the great lover. Were you in love with Peter?”

  Polly shook her head. “I thought it would be so marvelous to be ‘my lady.’ I was in love with that. I am as much to blame as Peter. I shall never try to step out of my class again.”

  “Come!” cried the marquis, feeling slightly alarmed at such penitence. “Don’t go rushing off in the other direction and marry a costermonger. Just be yourself, Polly Marsh, and nothing very bad will happen to you.”

  “I’ll try,” she said simply. “I left all Lady Jelling’s gowns with Miss Thistlethwaite. I don’t want to wear castoffs again.”

  “Must you always go to extremes?” said the marquis crossly. “They were perfectly charming frocks.”

  “Oh!” snapped Polly. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s easy for you. You are at the top of the social tree and everyone toadies to you.”

  “Except Polly Marsh,” he said, smiling faintly.

  The carriage had come to a halt.

  “This is good-bye, my lord,” said Polly, holding out her hand.

  “Shall we not see each other again?’”

  “I don’t think so, my lord,” said Polly, with her hand on the strap.

  “Then kiss me good-bye, Polly Marsh,” he teased.

  She leaned forward and kissed him quickly on his thin cheek but he gently drew her to him and bent his mouth to hers. Her whole body seemed to melt into that one kiss. They finally drew apart, breathless and shaken.

  “Come with me, Polly. Stay with me,” said the marquis huskily.

  She recoiled from him with her gloved hand to her mouth. “Oh!” she cried piteously. “You are every bit as bad as your brother.”

  “I didn’t mean… I meant…” he cried, stretching his hand forward. But the carriage door slammed and his footman was already on the pavement to help Polly with her bags.

  He must explain himself. He made a move as if to leave the carriage and sank back with a groan. What had he meant? To marry her? Nonsense. He had only meant… Oh, what did it all matter. The girl was very beautiful and the directors’ champagne had been very heady. He would come to his senses in the morning.

  Polly felt that this evening of seesawing emotions would never end. She pushed open the kitchen door and braced herself to meet her mother.

  Mrs. Marsh turned from the kitchen range and surveyed her daughter. “Don’t jest stand there, Pol,” she said finally. “Take yer things upstairs. I saved yer a bit of supper. Thought yer might be comin’ ’ome.” The rest of the family looked at Polly silently.

  “Ma!” said Polly, her voice breaking. “Oh, Ma.”

  “There, there, ducks,” crooned her mother, moving with surprising speed. She hustled Polly from the kitchen and up the stairs to her old, familiar room.

  “Naow, then,” said Mrs. Marsh, settling herself comfortably in an armchair. “You just go ahead and ’ave a good cry and then you tell your Ma all about it.”

  The rest of the family sat in the kitchen listening to the sounds of broken sobbing from above and then the murmur of quiet voices. Not even Alf Marsh considered going to investigate. Mrs. Marsh was ruler of her small kingdom and all laws and decisions were made by her.

  Mr. Baines lay beside his sleeping wife and stared up into the darkness of their bedroom ceiling and felt that his world had come to an end. Had he been a more callous man—yes, might as well admit it, a less decent man—he would have told Gladys to take her shrill voice and bullying ways straight back to her mother. But the new Edwardian liberalism had not penetrated to his Victorian soul. So he had done the “right thing.” Why then, did he feel so terrible?

  Had he not felt so terrible, he would never have told Lord Peter to take Polly to the deserted stockroom.

  An elusive aroma of Fleurs d’Antan still lingered in the chilly bedroom, like a memory of a golden summer. Mr. Albert Baines clenched his teeth to stop a groan from escaping and buried his aching head in his pillow.

  “Hah!” said Sir Edward Blenkinsop loudly. “Harrumph!” But the sleeping figure of his wife did not move. He stood in his long nightshirt glaring at the motionless woman lying on the bed. Her face looked drawn and old even in repose, and it made him feel obscurely guilty. But a wife’s place was with her husband, by Jove. He had done the right thing, hadn’t he? He’d forgiven her, hadn’t he?

  He had expected her to fall into his arms out of sheer gratitude. But she had complained of a headache
and taken a large dose of laudanum and promptly gone to bed. It struck him that ever since their wedding night he had rarely seen his wife awake. Once again she had fled from him into some country of dreams where he could not follow. He thought of that cosy little armful he had tucked away in a flat in the King’s Road. Dammit! It was different for men. Wasn’t it?

  Amy Feathers clasped her thin knees to her chest and stared out at the falling snow. It was all so hopeless. Bob Friend had taken her home. He had held her in his arms right on her own doorstep. He had kissed her and it had been the most wonderful, magical thing that had ever, ever happened to her. Then he had buried his lips in her hair and whispered, “Polly!”

  The Salvation Army carol singers were trumpeting out “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” at the corner of the street. It rang in Amy’s ears like a dirge.

  Lord Peter arrived late to his parents’ house party and despite his battered appearance—he had been set upon by a gang of thugs he had explained—set himself to please. The Pettigrew-Bryant relatives were delighted with him. What a splendid, upright young man. The very backbone of England. The very flower of English manhood. Splendid chap!

  It was going to be a jolly Christmas after all, thought Peter. He had quite put that embarrassing and squalid little incident with that office girl out of his head. One of the new chambermaids had looked at him just that evening with a very roguish twinkle in her eye. The world was full of delightful women just waiting for the charms of Peter Burley.

  He put a sprig of mistletoe in his buttonhole in case he should bump into the pretty chambermaid on the road to bed.

  The Marquis of Wollerton went to his club and got well and truly drunk for the first time in his life.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Christmas and Boxing Day crept past under leaden skies. The year was dead. The sparrows seemed to mourn as they hunched their little bodies on the warmth of sooty windowsills, and the starlings serenaded the dark sky with their long, descending metallic notes.

  All too soon the working day dawned for Polly. She had told her mother that she never wanted to see Westerman’s again. Mrs. Marsh had been horrified. One third of the country was living on starvation level. Unemployment was worse than during Victorian times. To turn down a good job was downright unchristian. She should be thankful that the only punishment her Maker had seen fit to mete out was a certain amount of social embarrassment. Mrs. Marsh bitterly regretted the elocution lessons. She deserved to be punished herself for giving her daughter ideas above her station. Polly must never, ever forget again that she was the daughter of working-class parents. A marriage into the lower middle class was possible, but no higher.

  Polly certainly thought she would never forget her position in life again. Never again did she want to see the Westermans or listen to their lazy, condescending drawls or face their hard, arrogant eyes.

  But as she walked down the Kingsland Road toward the City, she did experience a twinge of regret over having given away all those beautiful clothes.

  What Dickens would call “a London particular” had descended on the metropolis. Thick, suffocating, yellow fog blanketed the streets and alleys. Dressed once more in her office serge, Polly reflected that her frock would be filthy enough for the scrap heap by the time she finished work that day.

  The gaslights were still burning in the shop windows, small islands of warmth in a city of dreadful night. The fog seeped into the marrow of your bones and curled in great, fat snakes over the cobblestones as a passing hackney cut a passage through the yellow, choking sea. Everything smelled of fog. The bakery at the corner was baking loaves from fog; the sweetshop was selling sugar mice, licorice laces, Dutch clogs, bull’s-eyes, sherbet suckers, and striped humbugs—and all made out of candied fog. Bacon was fried in fog and fog had crept inside the milk bottles to float on the top of the cream in a layer of scum.

  The portals of Westerman’s loomed up in a forbidding abandon-hope-all-ye sort of way. The fog had arrived at the office before Polly, and Mr. Baines’s cadaverous face loomed up out of the gloom. He gave Polly a smile that was more like a grimace.

  Amy Feathers scuttled off into the gloom of the upstairs with her shoulders hunched. Bob Friend climbed up onto his high stool, looking sheepish and miserable.

  Work at Westerman’s had begun again.

  Never had Polly worked so diligently or so well.

  Somewhere in the pit of Mr. Baines’s spirits arose the thought that life might have a few gloomy pleasures left for him, and each energetic tap of Polly’s typewriter seemed to hammer away a few of the bitter memories for her.

  Amy Feathers felt that each signal from her small switchboard, with its commanding buzzing summons, was life giving her the raspberry, and she fantasized that Polly Marsh had just dropped dead of a heart attack. She, Amy, would of course weep a few tactful tears over the beautiful corpse. Polly’s body was being carried out of the office into the fog. “Forgive me, Amy,” Bob Friend was sobbing. “The poor girl is gone but I am so happy to realize that you are the girl I have loved all along!” And she would cradle his curly head on her thin bosom and whisper…

  “Miss Feathers!”

  Amy was so absorbed in her splendid dream that she was immensely shocked to turn around and find a very alive Polly Marsh standing behind her.

  “What is it?” snapped Amy, savagely plugging in a call as if she were sinking a knife into Miss Marsh’s delectable bosom.

  “Do you think I could possibly telephone Lady Blenkinsop?” asked Polly.

  “Personal calls not allowed,” said Amy, adding spitefully, “and that goes for calls to Buckingham Palace as well.”

  A faint sigh escaped Polly. “You have every reason to dislike me, Amy,” she said in a low voice. “I have not been very kind to you. But I did not realize until recently that you were in love with Mister Friend.”

  Now, no rejected lover wishes to be told that the heart she is wearing on her sleeve has been broadcasting its sad message to all and sundry. Amy turned on Polly in a fury.

  “I have no time to listen to your half-witted personal remarks, Miss Marsh. Please return to your duties and stop wasting my time, or I shall be obliged to report you to Mister Baines.”

  Polly trailed miserably away into the gloom of the foggy office. She was soon replaced by Bob Friend.

  “Amy,” he whispered to Amy’s rigid back. “I’m awfully sorry… about that night, I mean. I wasn’t really thinking of Polly.”

  “’Course you were,” said Amy with a shrill laugh. “But don’t worry. I was thinking of another chap myself. I was thinking of my fellow, Jim Cooper. We’ve been walking out together for ever so long.”

  Bob Friend felt himself becoming furious. “Then you had no right to let a chap hold you and kiss you if you’re promised to another bloke.”

  “Well, you were thinking of Polly.”

  “No, I was not. It was a slip of the tongue, that’s all,” said Bob angrily. “You’re the one that’s to blame… playing fast and loose with a chap’s affections.”

  “How dare you,” screamed Amy as the switchboard buzzed an angry counterpoint. “You and your old school friend, Polly Marsh.”

  “That’s different,” said Mr. Friend unforgivably. “She’s so pretty, you can’t blame a fellow for wanting to take her to lunch.”

  “And I’m so ugly, I’m expected to serve you your blasted lunch at the switchboard!”

  “Why you little cat,” hissed Bob.

  “You bounder.”

  “Shrew!”

  “Cad!”

  “What is all this noise about?” Mr. Baines stood surveying the angry pair. “Go back to your work, Mister Friend and, Miss Feathers, I have been trying to put a call through.”

  Bob Friend scurried off and Mr. Baines turned back to Amy. “Now, Miss Feathers, please telephone Putney twelve for me and put it through to my receiver downstairs.”

  Mr. Baines returned to his desk and sat looking at the black phone with a mixture of excit
ement and dread. It gave a faint tinkle and he snatched up the heavy receiver and put the earpiece to his ear. “Hullo,” bellowed a voice at the other end with enough force to crack the vulcanite. The Blenkinsop butler, Wilkins, considered the telephone an unnatural invention in the first place and in the second, he firmly believed that he had to make his voice carry all the way from Putney to the City of London by sheer volume.

  “May I speak to Lady Blenkinsop,” whispered Mr. Baines.

  “Beg parding?”

  “MAY I SPEAK TO LADY BLENKINSOP?”

  There was a sudden silence in the office and Mr. Baines could almost see everyone’s ears getting larger and larger.

  “There h’is no need to shout,” said Wilkins coldly. “Eh will h’acertain whether her ladyship is at home. What name shall eh say.”

  “Baines.”

  Mr. Baines pressed the earpiece harder against his ear. Somewhere in the distance he could just distinguish the pompous rumble of the butler’s voice and then a high, sweet voice that made his pulse race, then the heavy tread of Wilkins making his way back to the phone.

  “’Er ladyship h’is not at ’ome—home,” declared Wilkins in stentorian accents. Mr. Baines flushed miserably and put the earpiece back on its hook. He became aware of Polly standing beside him with a sheaf of letters and, looking up, he saw the reflection of his own stricken eyes in the expression in Polly’s wide blue ones.

  Why… she’s suffering as well, he thought. He cleared his throat. “I have several business matters to discuss and, as I notice the lunch hour has arrived, I wondered whether you would care to join me?”

  Polly nodded and went off to collect her coat. Soon both were making their way through the fog to the cosy warmth of Spielmann’s. Bloggs and Mr. Baines’s other friends watched him, their admiration knowing no bounds.

  Mr. Baines was trying to relive his first lunch with Lady Blenkinsop. He ordered the same food and the same wine. But all it did was accentuate his feeling of loss and his eyes filled with unmanly tears. Polly stared at him in dismay and somewhere in her mind came an echo of the marquis’s voice telling her it was better to talk away the hurt.